"Dramatically simplified" UI has its perks, but lost features and bugs confound users.

Apple promised that the eleventh major version of its media cataloging, syncing, and playback app would feature a "dramatically simplified new interface" and better integration with iCloud. So last Thursday, Apple finally released the highly anticipated update to iTunes after an initial one-month delay.

iTunes 11 isn't the ground-up rewrite some users may have expected. It's largely the same jumble of media storing, indexing, and playback for music and video, as well as ePub or PDF books and apps for your iOS devices. While some of the interface changes are indeed welcome, a few features that users relied heavily on have been left on the cutting room floor. More disconcerting, however, is that the release is marred by some confusing bugs despite that extra month Apple engineers spent polishing.

First, the good news

Apple definitely realized that iTunes had become a little unwieldy for many users. What started as a significant re-skinning of SoundJam MP—a popular MP3 jukebox app for Mac OS 8—has become the mother of all media apps. On top of importing, sorting, and playing back music, iTunes now handles TV shows, movies, and other video files. It organizes and syncs iOS apps for iPhones, iPads, and iPods. It also organizes and syncs (but does not allow users to read) e-books in iBooks, ePub, and PDF formats. It syncs iTunes purchases via iCloud and can access the iTunes store to buy music, apps, books, and more. Today, iTunes can also stream media over AirPlay to other Macs, Apple TVs, and AirPort Express base stations.

Apple has made a concerted effort to rethink the interface and make it cleaner and more approachable. iTunes 11 favors a visual display of your content, showing your music as a collection of album covers, apps as a series of icons, movies as a collection of preview frames, and books as a series of covers. For many users, especially newcomers, this visual organization will probably be a major improvement. More traditional list views are always available with a click, and they still offer detailed metadata in sortable columns.

At the top of the main window is the typical extended toolbar. The design has been refined; opinions on whether this is an improvement or not vary, but we think it looks nice. On the left, pause/play, forward, and back controls no longer appear as individual buttons. Rather, they are large, clickable shapes—not unlike similar controls on iOS. Continuing to the right are a volume slider, an AirPlay button, the central track info window, and the search box at the far right.

The track info window underwent some visual changes, though it does retain its rounded rectangular shape. Most notably, it now includes an icon that resembles a bulleted list to access the "Up Next" feature. Clicking here shows a list of upcoming songs in a pop-over view, with options to rearrange or insert songs into the current playlist. It appears Up Next is meant to replace the now-absent iTunes DJ, though as we'll note later it doesn't quite have all of that feature's functionality.

Enlarge/ iTunes 11's Up Next lets you tweak what tracks come next, especially if you want to rearrange or add to the current playlist.

A new arrow icon pops up next to a song title when you hover over the track info window. Clicking the arrow accesses the contextual menu for the currently playing track. You can rate the track, set it to "play next," or add it to Up Next (perhaps redundant for the currently playing track). You'll also have the option to use the track for a new genius playlist, get related Genius recommendations, or add the song to any playlist. And you can have iTunes go to the track, artist, or album in your library or show where the song is in the iTunes Store. (These contextual options are available for any selected song in iTunes.)

Below the main toolbar is a sort of navbar, which seems meant to replace the sidebar of yesteryear's iTunes. A drop-down menu on the left lets you switch between Music, Movies, TV Shows, Books, Apps, and Tones (ringtones for iPhones, that is). In the middle of this bar will be various options for viewing the selected media type. For instance, if music is active, you can choose to view your music as a list of songs, a grid of albums, a graphical list of artists or genres, or a grid of music videos or playlists... which then opens a sidebar of your playlists on the left, with lists of songs on the right, the usual list of streaming radio stations, and your iTunes Match tracks if you have the feature enabled.

On the right of the navbar are buttons for accessing any connected iOS or iPod devices, as well as a button to access the iTunes Store. Selecting a device shows the now-familiar options for configuring and syncing an iOS device or iPod.

Enlarge/ Syncing with iOS devices is largely unchanged, though there are a few visual tweaks.

Clicking to iTunes Store button loads the new and improved store, which mimics what we already saw with the iOS 6 update on iOS. Featured content is displayed in an automatically rotating set of 3D-rendered "cards" at the top. Sideways scrolling lists of album, movie, or app icons are arranged under various headings like "New" and "What's hot." The tab bar allows you to narrow the Store's wares to Movies, TV Shows, Apps, etc. Along the side are lists of top sellers in various categories.

Enlarge/ The iTunes Store now mimics the layout seen in iOS 6, for better or worse.

One nice touch is the new ability to scan an iTunes Gift card using your Mac's FaceTime camera (or presumably, any suitable webcam). The long strings of numbers and letters that make up the codes on iTunes Gift Cards can be bit of a pain to enter correctly. And according to a developer contracted by Apple to help build the new feature, it's also great for users with disabilities that might otherwise make it near impossible to redeem the gift cards without assistance.

This design isn't exactly new, but Ars Social Editor Cesar Torres suggests the new layout is a "great use of space" and that "the new layout seems to squeeze more titles in there than before."

But users who lament the missing sidebar can rejoice—you can easily bring it back with a simple click in the View menu. Anyone who hated iTunes 10's decidedly drab, monochrome icons in the sidebar will also be happy to note that their old color has returned.

Enlarge/ Turning on the sidebar and status bar should get you mostly back to the old iTunes 10 interface, if you prefer.

If you also miss the information that once appeared in the bottom status bar of iTunes, you can bring that back, too. However, with the re-arranging of most of the controls that used to live here—in particular AirPlay—the status bar is largely vestigial.

iTunes 11 also brings a new Album view. Here, all your albums are arranged in a scrollable grid. They can be sorted by artist, release year, or other criteria. Click an album, and a more detailed view of that album's songs rolls down. iTunes automatically "themes" this detail view using colors from the album cover for the background and text. It's a subtle but nice touch. An "In The Store" button lets you see what other songs from the artist or album are available.

Enlarge/ Clicking an album shows details "themed" to match the album cover art.

Another major change is the new "mini player" window. Apple has thankfully stopped using the standard "zoom" window control to activate the mini player, instead adding a specific control just to the left of the standard "full-screen" control on the main toolbar.

The new mini player.

In addition, the mini player is a bit more functional than the old design. The same "action" pop-up menu allows you to perform a number of actions on the currently playing song. Hovering over an album icon pops up the artist and song title. You can also access AirPlay, Up Next, and search options directly from the mini player, which gives users a lot of control outside of the main iTunes window.

Enlarge/ iTunes 11 mini player gives users far more controls than the basics of older versions.

It's worth noting that you can't switch on the mini player mode if iTunes is running as a full-screen app. But there is a workaround; you can switch iTunes out of full-screen mode, enable iTunes to show up in all spaces, open a mini player window, and then switch the full-size window to full-screen. The only downside: you're then stuck with iTunes showing up on all Spaces when not in full-screen mode. It might be easier for users if Apple simply automatically switched out of full-screen mode when users want to switch to the mini player.

The overall design definitely feels cleaner. Gradients and shadows are subtle, and various lists and organizational interface elements seem to use space more efficiently. Even the judicious use of white space makes the overall interface feel a little less busy.

In particular, Apple replaced the default Lucida Grande UI font from OS X with Helvetica, the main UI font on iOS. The change lends a certain aesthetic to the overall UI, but not everyone has been happy with it. As noted by John Gruber, it does indeed look "gorgeous" on a Retina display Mac (such as the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro I used to check out iTunes 11). Helvetica looks fine on non-Retina displays, but perhaps not as good as the screen-optimized Lucida Grande. The overall design actually feels geared toward Retina displays, right down to the tiny cover art icons that are crisp and recognizable on such displays.

As a bonus, the app seems to be a bit better overall when it comes to performance—at least on OS X. iTunes has never been especially speedy with any sort of sizable library, but long lists of apps and albums in my library scrolled swiftly and smoothly.

210 Reader Comments

Still can't transcode on the fly so that I don't have to maintain my ripped music as both a lossless file supported by the Xboxen I use for streaming and the iPads/iphones my wife and I own.

It can translate this files the first time it launches, but heaven forbid it just access the files like any other when played locally and transcode them into something smaller and compatible when transferred to the iPhone.

For instance, the new album view seems to completely replace the former Cover Flow view,

And nothing of value was lost. Cover flow is one of those form over function things that demos well but has almost no value at all for the user. I always dread accidentally to rotate my iPod touch during song selections, just to be thrown in the useless cover flow.

Quote:

Though the poorly executed Ping social media network is now gone

See above. Ping is one of those things that should have been smothered to death immediately.

That being said, it's very irritating that they removed the "Show duplicate songs" feature. That was very handy to see if any songs or albums I downloaded from other music services or from my iPod (in a nasty loss of my library panic) that were doubled up. I have TuneUp that has a find duplicates feature, but it works rather poorly.

I have really liked the added integration of iCloud, and the interface changes are nice (particularly grouping TV seasons together); however, the one bug that really bugs me is that when I watch a TV show in a season other than the first season, after I start the episode, iTunes resets back to Season 1 in the window, so that it is a hassle to watch consecutive episodes in any season other than the first, requiring me to re-select the season every time. A minor bug, but it's one that I feel like should have been fairly obvious in testing.

And: there is still no obvious way to change the type of imported files from music to whatever. The obscure trick of altering data under Info must be used, but it inexplicably quit working on lots of 30 min audio language files.

iTunes remains a jumbled mishmash after years of versions. C'mon Apple, create another team(s) to do a clean design of a couple of replacement apps.

I love my IPod touch, but after struggling with Itunes and seeing Android users just drag and drop files on their phones, I finally got tired. Don't know about Mac, but Itunes was terrible on Windows the last time I used it. I still use it for syncing music to my wife's IPOD touch, but I simply won't buy another Ipod touch (no matter how tempted I am by the latest iteration, which is awesome).

I started using 11 today, and was happily impressed with the new interface. It finally doesn't feel like a hodge podge of revisions stacked on top of each other. I don't use any of the missing features, and would love Coverflow to disappear from iOS as well. I know it was the product of an Ars citizen that apple bought, but they spread it across their devices willy-nilly when there was little functional benefit. Still early in using the release, but so far so good.

That being said, it's very irritating that they removed the "Show duplicate songs" feature. That was very handy to see if any songs or albums I downloaded from other music services or from my iPod (in a nasty loss of my library panic) that were doubled up. I have TuneUp that has a find duplicates feature, but it works rather poorly.

Okay, out of all the changes listed, and actual bugs aside, that there will annoy me. I used that feature as well and none of the dupe finder programs I've tried work all that great. Then again, the feature itself in iTunes wasn't that hot either, but at least it was there.

With a playlist in album view iTunes stops after each album. To have it actually play through the playlist you have to use the title view which then lacks any cover art, it's just a drab text list.

You can get a cover art window by clicking on the cover in the toolbar but this is a Quicktime window then (with another set of controls, by the way) which immediately gets covered by the main window as soon as you click there. You *can* set the cover art window to stay always on top in the preferences, but then it will stay on top of all windows of all apps, which isn't the right thing either... Since the (optional) cover art in the sidebar is also gone, the only way to drag/paste cover art now is to open the info window on a track (or an album or a selection of tracks) and drag it there. It's almost as if someone at Apple totally hates album covers. Strange.

Still can't transcode on the fly so that I don't have to maintain my ripped music as both a lossless file supported by the Xboxen I use for streaming and the iPads/iphones my wife and I own.

It can translate this files the first time it launches, but heaven forbid it just access the files like any other when played locally and transcode them into something smaller and compatible when transferred to the iPhone.

I guess I'm slow, because I don't understand the difference between what you want to do and the Convert Higher Bitrate option, which, when it sync, converts lossless to 128, 196, or 256 Kbs (iirc) lossy format.

That being said, it's very irritating that they removed the "Show duplicate songs" feature. That was very handy to see if any songs or albums I downloaded from other music services or from my iPod (in a nasty loss of my library panic) that were doubled up. I have TuneUp that has a find duplicates feature, but it works rather poorly.

Okay, out of all the changes listed, and actual bugs aside, that there will annoy me. I used that feature as well and none of the dupe finder programs I've tried work all that great. Then again, the feature itself in iTunes wasn't that hot either, but at least it was there.

I used this feature a lot. My library contains a lot of albums, and this allowed me to find dupes due to greatest hits/compilations/live albums relatively easy. I tried to make sure only one copy of a given song was up-rated, with the rest one-starred to avoid inclusion in smart playlists and such.

I love my IPod touch, but after struggling with Itunes and seeing Android users just drag and drop files on their phones, I finally got tired. Don't know about Mac, but Itunes was terrible on Windows the last time I used it. I still use it for syncing music to my wife's IPOD touch, but I simply won't buy another Ipod touch (no matter how tempted I am by the latest iteration, which is awesome).

Not to mention the way my iPod Touch randomly decides it doesn't want to do wifi-synch when I'm at my win7 computer and gives odd errors about 25% of the time I connect the two by cable and try to synch. I now have a Nexus 7 and am slowly building my Google Play Music cloud library (slow, because you're actually uploading full files but at least they let me upload flac (even if they convert to 320 mp3)).

I really wish Ars would acknowledge that there's more iTunes installations on Windows than Mac and review both versions.

It's official. ITunes is becoming Office-ized. It's got to maintain a mushrooming backlog of disparate features to keep the existing user base happy, while trying to add on new ones, all while trying to maintain a consistent UI. I wonder when they'll introduce their own ribbon equivalent.

I have huge stability issues with iTunes 11 on my machine (Windows Vista). It regularly just hangs, and for some reason it seems to grab the USB subsystem in some strange way that sometimes trips up photo management apps.

Apart from that, I think I like the new interface. But takes some getting used to.

That's all I really wanted to say, but in order to stay on topic, I like what I see out of the updates..

I'll be curious to see how it works on Windows.. iTunes on Windows is what has kept me out of the Apple Ecosytem in the past (only have it because my car has a 30pin dock that isn't compatible with adapters, so I rock a classic for my car tunes).. it is a slow, onerous beast of a program that has a commanding lead on programs that have cause me to curse at my computer..

My girlfriend was having fits over this new version. She doesn't know computers well, and couldn't get anything to "work the way it used to". After digging through all the menus and options, I basically got it back to the way it was.

Kind of a stupid move to change everything people have been used to for years. Seems Microsoft isn't alone with bone headed mistakes. At least Apple left the options in to make it functionally the same as older versions.

Well it loads faster on Windows 7 64 bit. Can't say I love it or hate it. Pretty neutral on the whole thing.Do have to agree its got some bugs for sure. But its expected for Apple anymore. Too bad Apple jams beta's into what they call updates and people are stuck with no downgrade options. Best thing Windows users can do is uninstall Apple update. That way you can wait until Apple fixes the mess.

Search takes a huge amount of time to respond after the first character is entered on a library of large size (100k items here). Deleting back to one character also results in the same 35-40 second delay. Makes search completely unusable for me. If it just waited for the second character before displaying results on suitably large lists the system would probably be fine (or probably, if you could turn off album covers from showing up as well). Such a basic feature is hard to miss.

I dont believe Match supports 250,000 songs as stated in the article. Thats Amazon. iTunes Match only supports 25,000 which is about 20,000 songs short of my %100 legal library. Granted my library is much larger than an average persons, if only Apple would let me pay double a year (or just up their limit) so I can use Match. I dont like splitting my library into different accounts just so I can have access to it remotely. Everyone at work uses Match and loves it, Amazons service is a bit clunkier and I am not interested, hoping Apple ups their capacity.

I'm sorry but if you were confused by the new iTunes, then you have to be an idiot. What in gods name couldn't she figure out? I mean seriously, its the same thing except faster with a few UI tweaks thrown in. Get a smarter girlfriend.

I let my computer go overnight to update the library from 10 to 11 and it wasn't finished 10 hours later. I had to take the machine with me and had to force quit. My library is on an external drive... I'll try again this weekend when I have more time to let it sit, but 10 hours to update an XML file is ridiculous.

Overall iTunes 11 is a very welcome update. I very much like the new UI. The grouping of TV seasons is nice, though slightly quirky. I love the way album view works, sliding down the contents of the album in a contextual box which color-matches with the album cover.

A number of us have fallen prey to a bug with artwork though. Be it with music or videos, trying to replace artwork seems to cause iTunes 11 to inexplicably hang. Whether this is attempted via drag/drop or copy/paste doesn't seem to matter. In several cases I've lost access to the artwork tab altogether, being that it's still there but grayed out, preventing me from making another attempt to add/change the current artwork.

There are a few other bugs I've run into, but nothing of major consequence which this article hasn't already touched on... yet.

I let my computer go overnight to update the library from 10 to 11 and it wasn't finished 10 hours later. I had to take the machine with me and had to force quit. My library is on an external drive... I'll try again this weekend when I have more time to let it sit, but 10 hours to update an XML file is ridiculous.

I also ran into this issue. My iTunes library resides on a Drobo so I know the throughput is slow, but the drive is reliable for me.

After I relaunched iTunes 11 after force-quitting it had no issue finishing its update and moving on with introducing me to the new UI.

My girlfriend was having fits over this new version. She doesn't know computers well, and couldn't get anything to "work the way it used to". After digging through all the menus and options, I basically got it back to the way it was.

Kind of a stupid move to change everything people have been used to for years. Seems Microsoft isn't alone with bone headed mistakes. At least Apple left the options in to make it functionally the same as older versions.

I'm generally in favor of experimental progress. While change for the sake of change isn't generally appreciated it is something Apple is very good at.

I find the new iTunes refreshing, and while they certainly could have done better with it, I imagine most of our quibbles will either be fixed through updates or die down as we get used to the changes.

Really miss the album art in list view. Not just for aesthetics -- it did a good job of providing some grouping, so you don't just get an endless list. It also did a good job of emphasizing the difference between full albums and random individual tracks. (This distinction is sorely needed in other areas, too, like in lists of artists or albums.)

But why does iTunes still eat CPU time when it is not playing any music?

You may want to check to see if genius is turned on. It really bogs down iTunes if you have a large library since it needs to crawl through all of you stuff to match create a genius database for matching content. I usually turn genius off, I barely use it anyway.